Endless Loop
by guiltysecret79
Summary: Follows on from my other story, Pockets.  Donna Noble isn't anybody's shadow. She's more than capable of making her own way in the universe, and the universe should probably be thankful for that.


Endless Loop

Despite what she allowed Jack to believe when she borrowed, well, more like _stole_, his teleport, Donna has no intention of running straight back to the Doctor. For one thing, she couldn't really recalibrate Jack's teleport as fast as she suggested to the dumbstruck former Time Agent. But she's learnt a lot from her new Time Lord mind, and a great deal of it comes down to one simple thing – style. She knows instinctively that you can get away with almost anything if you throw up enough spectacle around it.

Her life started to change long before her untimely death by taxi. She'd kept temping to help pay the bills, but in her free time she'd felt compelled to write. Impossible things spilled from her fingers at one hundred words per minute in the tiny back room of her mother's house. 'Agatha Christie in Space', one reviewer had called her, no doubt revelling in the parallel of two murder mystery authors linked not only by their oeuvre but by mysterious bouts of amnesia. Looking back, she finds this terribly amusing.

Her grandfather had proof-read her books eagerly, suggesting a tweak here and there and helping her knock a few rough edges off John Smith, hapless intergalactic detective. Despite his enthusiasm, he'd always seemed troubled by her jokes that 'Doctor' Smith felt like a separate entity within her mind, but he'd supported her nonetheless. Even her mother had been unexpectedly encouraging when she'd announced that she was planning to write a novel.

The books sold well. The sales of her third book eclipsed those of the offerings from perennial summer bestsellers like Dan Brown and Michael Crichton. She'd used the proceeds to buy a country estate, Eddison Grange. When they'd moved into the rambling old house, an awestruck Sylvia had described it as straight out of a murder mystery. Wilf had remained oddly quiet.

The third time she dies, she manages to trigger the emergency program on her teleport before the regeneration energy takes hold. It drops her into Jack's office in Torchwood Cardiff. Even to her fading sight it's clear that Jack and Ianto weren't expecting company.

"Oi, Lovebirds," she manages to croak before the fire and the agony take her.

Mickey is her saviour that day. At Jack's horrified summons he rushes into the office, takes one look at the incandescent form collapsing to the floor, and calmly walks away to put the kettle on. He's rather more surprised when, returning to the office bearing a laden tea tray, he finds a woman slumped against Jack's desk.

Mickey is head of the Torchwood R and D department, based out of the old Torchwood Estate in Scotland. He's greying now, and starting to put on weight around the gut since he no longer draws field duty. Advancing years aside, he can still turn in a good sprint when he hears the distinctive pop and hiss of an arriving teleport in the halls of his domain.

He both loves and dreads Donna's visits. On the one hand it's good to see her, and she often helps decipher the bits of tech they're having no luck with. But then, inevitably, she will disappear into the vaults and help herself to the pick of the shelves at will.

He feels a deep and weary empathy for the authors of the old UNIT reports his department… _…acquired…_ not so long ago, the ones which express, through layers of officialese and military euphemism, the complete bewilderment of the staff who were expected to work on a daily basis with an unpredictable, and unmistakably _alien_, alien.

Torchwood also crosses paths with the Doctor on a number of occasions. Each time, he's surprised with their progress since he saw them last. Each time, they adhere to the new unwritten rule, latest in the weighty invisible rulebook, which states 'never mention Donna to the Doctor'.

She journeys through the stars with her array of gizmos liberated from Torchwood. They're advanced technology, not safe to be left mouldering in the twenty first century, so she reasons that she's doing the universe a favour by taking them.

She finds the Tardis on one such trip, and she can't resist going over and giving the old girl a pat. The possibility that it's her Doctor passing through is too good to miss.

"Excuse me," she asks, "have you seen a skinny bloke in a suit go by?"

The man in the scarf looks at her as if she is some strange puzzle to solve, but eventually shakes his head.

On her travels, she loses her name. The knowledge in her head allows her to speak the languages of a million races, but when she gives her name, it is the meaning, not the pronunciation, that is conveyed. 'The Lady' becomes known on a thousand worlds.

Travelling alone is hard. She returns to Earth less frequently as those whom she remembers fall to time's relentless advance. There is no-one to stand beside her as she scatters Wilf's ashes into the heart of a distant sun. She couldn't give him the stars, but now at least she can leave him with them.

She sometimes thinks of her twin, although she knows he must be dead, having lived out the mortal span her humanity gifted him. It leaves a hollow ache to think that the measure of Donna Noble that he absorbed will be long gone by now. Eventually, there are only she and Jack who remain of those who fought Davros at the Crucible.

She watches Ianto's funeral from the trees at the edge of the crematorium. The mourners leave; they're mostly Torchwood employees come to bid their deeply respected Director farewell, she notes, and soon a solitary figure remains, studying the floral tributes outside the chapel.

"It doesn't get any easier," he says as she approaches. "No matter how many die."

She places a hand on his shoulder. Neither speaks, but when Jack finally turns to look at her, the despair in his eyes forces her to act. Tightening her grip on his suit jacket, her hand moves to the teleport device on her wrist and she answers his unspoken plea.

The leaves swirl briefly where they stood, and then lie still once more.

She takes him to Felspoon to see the mountains sway; he watches them silently, then wonders aloud what Ianto would have thought of them. She sighs deeply, and teleports them again, trying to fill the yawning void in Jack's heart with the universe. Travelling together is eventful to say the least. On a hundred worlds, they grasp hands and run.

She can feel the wrongness of Jack, a hairline crack in space around him; he doesn't quite fit in the slot the universe allows for him, and through the gaps the Void flickers, catching her eye when she looks at him, like sunlight through a chink in a wall. This is what drove the Doctor to run from him, this unavoidable difference, but she tolerates it; her foreknowledge of his place in the future gives her no option. Without a hand to hold, he will break under the pressure of so many millennia.

She comes and goes, leaving him to live lives on a dozen worlds, but always returning after a span, ready to look for the next adventure. Usually she skips forward, letting seventy years pass in an eyeblink, but sometimes she heads off on her own to explore, living each moment until she returns to him, the Fixed Point in Time's only point of reference.

She can see so much. Time Lord mind, human spark, the fates on her back and eons of life have shown her the truth of many things. Sometimes she finds it hard to believe that she has not been driven as mad as Dalek Caan.

She sees that time is an endless Mobius strip, coiled tightly in the void. Sees the parallel universes for what they are – the stacked loops of time's endless march. Knows instinctively the ceaseless repetition of the cycle, each time a minute variation on the last.

She wonders if the great civilisation of Gallifrey would enjoy the irony of being the greatest paradox of them all. For, in exiling their wayward brother back a step to Pete's World (_and oh, how perfect, how fitting, that she still considers it by such a human name_), the Oncoming Storm, destroyer of their race, also became their progenitor. The greatest race in the entire galaxy, descended from two stupid little apes, the shop-girl and the temp, and the instigator of their own genocide. They are tiny drop in the immense gene pool of the human race, but the children of the hybrid Time Lord and the Bad Wolf, changed forever by the heart of the Tardis, will be the catalyst for the emergence of the new race.

She watches the Tardis materialise in New New York, sees the youthful faces of the occupants as they enter the city. Even the Doctor, some 900 years old, seems little more than a child to her now. She waits patiently for events to unfold. Eventually the exodus from below begins and she grieves silently, foreknowledge doing nothing to soften the blow of her loss.

She has served her purpose, fulfilled her self-imposed obligation to Jack. She has just one more duty left, one more broken cog in the intricate mechanism of the universe to set to rights.

He's still soaking wet from the Chiswick rain, slumped against the Tardis coral, despairing, tired, and so jarringly, achingly young to her ancient eyes. She knows that for him, only minutes have passed since he left her empty shell in the care of her mother and Wilf. He's broken, closer to human than ever before, and she realises that she has avoided returning until now for that very reason. Over the centuries he has slipped ever closer to the race which accepted him when his own rejected him, offered him sanctuary when he was the last of his kind. He needed her to return more Time Lord than human to pull him back from the precipice.

Even after all the time that she has endured, she can't help but smile when he spots her standing where she had materialised for that first time, a point both two years and a thousand lives ago. It is a dizzy blend of the familiar and the almost forgotten.

"What?" he says, instantly manic and wild eyed, falling back into his role as the Doctor, the grieving man fading behind the irrepressible alien.

There's only one way she can respond to such characteristic confusion. Opening her arms wide, and pulling the Donna-that-was to the fore, she replies.

"Oi Spaceboy, what did you go and do that for?"


End file.
